ABSTRACT
Gaming curation as practiced by fandom draws attention to three challenges to the idea of a classic text by accommodating: games that are universally considered 'bad'; games and systems that were never released; and games that were released but 'flopped'. Contemporary gaming culture favours a constant exchange, storage, discussion and manipulation of information about games past and present. Gamers can act as private collectors and create communities to share tips on how to curate their own collections. Museums can contribute by selecting a canon of classics, and each museum has a different stance on what it needs to preserve. There are, thus, multiple criteria for the preservation of a game: antiquity, innovation, excellence, historic value, visual quality, aesthetic expression, cultural relevance, good use of technology, significant interaction design and commercial success. The challenge of preserving unfinished games is great: unless one has access to the studio assets, the game itself is impossible to obtain.
